I was still sitting in my chair wondering about my life—past, present, and future—when Griff returned. Truth be told, I was in a bit of a stupor. I had no Skills, no knowledge, and no resources. My future was looking bleak; I was completely dependent on the generosity of petty criminals and outcasts. If any deities happen to be listening to my thoughts, could you kindly provide me with a nice and easy path to independence? Some memories would go amiss, either. I looked around on the off chance that a powerful artifact would appear out of thin air. Well, since nothing happened I guess I have to make my own way. Damn. I guess I should learn all I can from Griff, but then what? Before I could develop any concrete goals, a knock on the doorframe roused me from my daze.

“You ready for training lad?” Griff asked from the doorway. He was carrying a burlap sack that seemed to be filled with stones.

“Yep,” I replied.

Griff led me around the edge of town to another house, one slightly larger than mine, but much better constructed and complete with a chimney.

“This is my place. Feel free to knock on my door if ya need help and I’ll answer if I’m in. For now, take a seat,” he nodded towards some nearby stumps, “and I’ll start by teaching ya how to make yourself a spear.”

We took our seats and he handed me a couple stones, some animal hide, and a bit of bone from the sack he was carrying.

“Now this is a piece of flint,” Griff said, holding up a rock like one of the ones he handed me, “and it has been sitting by a fire to make it easier to shape. You’ll be making a spearhead, but the same techniques are used for arrowheads and the like.” From there, he showed me how to knap the flint into a spearhead, proving to be surprisingly adroit at fine shaping with his single hand.

After a couple hours and several misshapen lumps of stone, I finally had a spearhead that he claimed was “good enough, for now.” At that point, I asked, “So, earlier you said you were going to teach me some Skills, am I going to get one for flint knapping? How does that work?”

“Nah, there isn’t a Skill for knapping, so far as I know, anyway. It might contribute to the Wilderness Survival Skill though. Far as I can tell, Skill levels are just a way to measure how much you know and how experienced you are in certain areas. As you demonstrate increased knowledge and experience, the level goes up. You can’t just do the same thing over and over again and expect to gain Skill levels unless you’re finding ways to do it better.”

Next, Griff had me choose a spear shaft from a pile of pre-prepared ones he had behind his house. I asked about them; apparently he made spears and arrows for the people of the village. I did my best to pay attention as he explained what qualities to look for in a potential spear shaft and how to shape the wood into a proper shaft. Next, he told me where I could find suitable plant fibers and how to rough cord out of them. Finally, he taught me how to attach the head, leaving me with a completed spear that I promptly Identified.

Flint Spear (Crude). Base damage: 4. Requires 5 Strength.

Yep, it wasn’t much, but it was mine. Hopefully it would help me survive.

At this point it was getting past noon, so we took a break to eat in the shade of a tree. Lunch was a purple root vegetable Griff called garov, some cured venison, and some bitter tea. I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I was hungry enough that it didn’t matter. Plus I didn’t know when my next meal might be.

As we were finishing up lunch, I took the opportunity to ask, “So how do Health and Mana work?”

“Right, knew I was forgettin’ something important earlier. It actually all comes back to something called essence, which is how you raise your Level. Your Level is determined by how much essence you have—essence being the rather vague term some scholar gave to magical energy. Your body draws in essence from the environment over time, but that’s slow—real slow. A hundred years would only get you to about Level 5 or 6 in a normal environment. Higher levels take increasingly more essence, by the way. Some places have more or less essence, which can speed up or slow down gathering. Easiest way to tell is how strong the local animals are; we’ve got normal essence ‘round here, by my reckoning.” Griff trailed off for a moment, looking into the forest. After a moment, his attention turned back to me.

“Now, where was I? Ah, right, essence gathering. With a little bit of training and patience, you can meditate to gather essence about ten to fifteen times faster than passively gathering it. This is especially effective in places with high essence. ‘Course it’s especially dangerous in those places too—animals and people won’t have any trouble sneaking up on you, and they benefit from the higher essence too. Those animals can actually be the fastest way to gain levels, and the riskiest. When something dies, it releases the essence it gathered during its life, creating an area with an extreme amount of essence for a little bit. You meditate where lots of things have just died, like a battlefield, your essence will go through the roof.

“Anyway, when you gather essence it goes one of two places: your body or your core. Well ‘core’ is a bit of a misnomer since it’s not really physical; it’s just sort of parallel to your body, ya know? Your soul maybe?” Here Griff scrunched up his face and looked off into the forest again. “Anyway, the point is when it goes to your body it augments your Health and when it goes to your core it augments your Mana. Now, you, along with every animal and even some plants, produce both Health and Mana. Health naturally shields you from damage to a certain extent, especially magical damage, with higher Health being able to block a higher percent of the damage. Say, for example, you were to stab me in the chest with your spear. With your Strength and my relatively high Health, you would probably take off a few points of Health but barely break my skin.

“The other thing Health is good for is boosting your physical performance. You can enhance your body to swing harder, run faster, jump higher, and so forth. This does use up Health though, so you have to be careful. Rearching zero Health won’t actually kill you, but any attack that hits you when you have zero Health probably will.

“Mana is fairly simple: you use it to cast spells. You can also imbue objects with it, giving them additional properties. That’s what separates the truly master craftsmen from the rest of us—their works are always imbued to perfection. I’m no wizard or master craftsman though, so I can’t tell you any more about that.

“Anyway, using your Health or Mana will speed up your production of it. If you use one a lot more than the other, more of the essence you gather will go to it, increasing its capacity more than the other. That’s how you get mages with high Mana and low Health and warriors with the opposite.” He paused for a bit, then continued, “I guess that was probably a lot to take in at once. Any questions?”

“Umm, so does everyone just gain essence by killing animals since that’s fastest? Wouldn’t that cause overhunting problems?”

“Well, most people, especially in cities, don’t really bother with essence or Leveling at all. It’s just not worth the risk to most of them. Of course, the rich just pay others to bring them animals to kill—makes ‘em feel strong without any idea how to use their strength. Foolish, if you ask me. Soldiers generally get a couple levels from hunting animals during their training, but the rest come from killing each other. As for overhunting, it does happen, but the young of non-magical species start with no essence. Magical species can be extremely dangerous, so they often kill their hunters and everything sort of balances out in the end.”

“Alright. So, do you need to meditate to get essence from animals when they die? And can you teach me how to meditate?”

“Well, it certainly helps. There are actually some specific visualization techniques that most people use though. I’m not much good at meditating myself, but I’ll try to work something out for you.”

With this explanation, a rough plan for my future was beginning to spring to mind. To survive and support myself, whether or not I found some unheard of way to deal with my amnesia, I would need to grow strong. And to grow strong, I would need to brave the wilderness and hunt magical animals.

While I was busy musing about my future (definitely not fantasising about being strong enough to face dragons—and how did I still know about dragons anyway?), it turned out Griff was getting impatient. This I found out when he smacked my shoulder with the butt of my new spear.

Health -1: Blunt Force

“You can gather your wool later! Right now you’re going to learn how to use the finest weapon known to man, or any other species for that matter: the spear. In addition to being easy to make, as you should have already realized, the spear lets you stay nice and far back from whatever you’re fighting, be it man or animal. Nobles might like to prance around with their swords, but they always put an army between themselves and any actual danger. The rest of us have to get our hands dirty every now and again, hence the spear.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking: if I want to be away from danger, surely a bow would be better? But let me tell ya, if something is jumping out of the trees at you, a bow won’t do you any good, even if you have it handy and strung. And that’s not to mention all the other uses of a spear: it doubles as a walking stick, helps fording streams, and can be used to poke at dodgy ground.”

Now, his argument sounded good, and I did want to learn how to fight (or at least defend myself), but his smile was bordering on a leer and making me really question the wisdom of staying. Alas, if I ever wanted to realize my newfound dream of being able to fight dragons (not actually fighting them though, mind you—that didn’t seem very sensible), I would have to start somewhere.

It turned out I was right to be wary of training with Griff. We started out simple enough, with me holding the spear in various positions and him correcting me by hitting various body parts with another spear shaft. Next, we moved on to slow-motion thrusts, jabs, and stabs.

At this point it became abundantly clear to me, and probably Griff, that whatever I had been doing before in my life, it didn’t involve a spear. Or strenuous activity of any kind. The slow motions made my muscles burn so much that Griff’s corrective taps were welcome in comparison. Soon sweat was dripping off every part of my body despite the rather pleasant air temperature. Thankfully, Griff did provide me with water that he assured me was safe to drink. I guess he didn’t want me to actually pass out, but just wish I could.

Not a moment too soon, we moved on to full speed thrusts. Griff had a set of five targets of varying heights in a semicircle. He would call out a number and I would strike the corresponding target as fast as I could. He still hit me with his stick to correct my stance and occasionally had me switch to a different grip on the spear.

After about fifteen minutes of that, a screen popped up in my vision, making me stumble and pause.

Spear Skill advanced to Level 1!

I couldn’t help but exclaim, “I got the Spear Skill!”

“Good for you! Just like half the ten-year-olds in the Empire. Now get back to work; just because the System thinks you’re not still totally incompetent doesn’t mean I do! Five!” After that, Griff started calling out numbers even faster, clearly not content to let me revel in my victory.

After spending what seemed like the whole day stabbing the targets, but probably wasn’t longer than an hour, Griff let me take another water break. Next, he had me practice running forwards and backwards with the spear, stabbing or turning when he called out.

Now, the trees by the village were quite large, with an average diameter of over four feet with the canopies match, so the trees were quite far apart. That, combined with the lack of undergrowth, which someone had obviously cleared out around the village, meant there was quite a lot of space to run around in. However, there were still roots, and a lot of them. So I tripped. And fell. And tumbled, stumbled, and all other manners of finding myself unexpectedly on the ground. Towards the end, I wasn’t even sure if I was tripping over anything or just collapsing in exhaustion.

Each fall only took off about one of my Health points, except for the time I hit my head, which was five points of damage. However, they added up, despite my regeneration. By the time Griff finally relented, I was just over half Health.

When Griff handed me a waterskin, I thought it would finally time for a break. Oh, how naive I was. After thirty seconds gulping water while being harried by Griff’s dulcet tones, it was back to the targets for me, with Griff again shouting out numbers. Only this time he added something extra.

It turned out that while I was running and faceplanting like a fool, he hadn’t just been standing around laughing at me. He had been gathering acorns, pinecones, sticks, pebbles, and whatever else he could find from the forest floor as ammunition. To throw at me.

I quickly gathered that the point of this exercise was to practice dodging with a spear while still attacking, and not just some new form of torture for Griff’s amusement. Unfortunately, this wasn’t from any great reasoning on my part. After my third time in a row being hit by Griff’s throws, he shouted, “Dodge, you nimwit! Don’t just stand there while someone’s attacking you!”

Yeah, not my finest moment. At least Griff knew what he was doing; he kept his throws fast enough that I could dodge them, but only just. He also threw them hard enough to be painful, but never took off more than one Health point at a time. Hooray for me.

Between the exhaustion and the literal pain of my failures, I soon entered a sort of fugue state. Sidestep and thrust forward, duck, turn to the right and stab high—it all became a blur as I fell into a rhythm. Well, not precisely a rhythm because Griff was varying the timing of his throws and target calls, but I was dodging and striking without conscious thought. On and on it went as I let my mind wander off into the void.

“There, now you’re getting it!” The shout roused me from my trance enough that the next projectile caught me in the hip. Thankfully, it didn’t completely faze me and I managed to dodge the next few with ease, all while striking the targets. I realized that yes, I was indeed doing better. A new strength seemed to be infusing my limbs. My exhaustion was still present, but only in the backdrop of my mind. I could dodge and strike with ease and, to my elation, continued to do so as Griff started to throw and call targets faster and faster.

And then, mid-jab, my newfound strength disappeared. All the exhaustion and aches came rushing back, hitting me like a tsunami. I found myself reacquainted with my friend, the forest floor, with no memory of falling.

I made no move to get up. The entire idea was inimical to me. To my surprise, instead of shouting or throwing more projectiles at me, Griff walked over and handed me the waterskin.

“Well, good work. You actually lasted longer than I thought.”

I grunted in response, but did manage to sit up and start drinking the water.

“In case you haven’t figured it out,” he continued, “you managed to start using your Health pool to strengthen your body. When you run out of Health, that strength leaves abruptly. I generally find that it’s best if people know what that’s like before it happens to them in a real fight.” Griff spoke genially, as if I wouldn’t have been screaming in pain if I had the energy to do so. The bastard.

I had suspected the Health thing, but the confirmation was nice. Now, if only I could move without every muscle fiber in my body protesting, everything would be great. While sitting there, I noted that the sun was getting close to the horizon and realized that my previously unnoticed hunger had already reached the gnawing stage. I couldn’t summon the energy to do anything about it though. Or care, really.

Griff seemed perfectly content to stand there with that affable smile on his and keep talking while I wallowed in my pain. “You handled that whole session remarkably well. Normally I have people swearing at me by the end of the first hour and trying to kill me by the end.” Right, you sadistic fuck, I’m going to cuss out the only person I know that seems to be interested in my survival, I thought, nice and safe from reprisal in my own mind. I certainly wasn’t about to physically attack him; I had no illusions about what would happen if I tried that.

I didn’t reply, and he continued on, unconcerned. “You should consider yourself lucky, really. Some people take several sessions like that to start augmenting their body. Some don’t even have the willpower to push themselves to get there at all. Now that you’ve done it once, the next time should be a lot easier. When you get tired, just imagine that same feeling of energy suffusing your body. Keep practising and you’ll be able to summon it when you’re not tired at all, and eventually you can concentrate it on specific body parts for much better efficiency. You’ll be leaping over boulders before you know it.”

He paused and looked at me. I reckoned he was waiting for me to say or do something, so I just gave another noncommittal grunt.

“Well, you just rest there then, and I’ll sort out some dinner for us. Maybe I’ll even find something for you to do tomorrow.” With that, he left, and I lay back down on the ground.

While lying there, I thought I might as well put my time to some use, so I summoned my Status screen. The first thing I noticed was that I actually had gotten another level in Spears, bringing me to a whopping Level 2. Why didn’t I get a noticeable notification for that, like I did before? I wondered. Oh right, I probably got it while dodging stones. It wouldn’t exactly be safe to worry about Skill levels in combat; it’s probably some sort of a safety feature.

The next thing I noticed was that Health had already regenerated to one. I wasn’t positive, but I thought that my Health regeneration might have also gone up a little bit. At first, I wasn’t sure increasing my Health related stats was beneficial, since it meant more essence I gathered would go towards Health. In what I was beginning to think of as my previous life, I had clearly been more oriented towards Mana and magic, so I would have a head start there and more essence to Health would hurt my potential. Ultimately, I realized I was being an idiot and that what was important was my immediate survival, and not some hypothetical future where I relearned magic.

The final thing I noticed was that the changes to my Status screen had affected both my true Status and the Obfuscated section. This called for some experimentation. The first thing I tried was setting my Obfuscated Health to five and seeing what would happen when I regenerated another point. After a long wait, my actual Health ticked up to two and my Obfuscated Health changed to six. So, I thought, Obfuscated stats default to operating in parallel to my real ones. The next thing I tried was setting my Obfuscated Health Regen to 1/sec. Sure enough, my Obfuscated Health started rapidly climbing. That sorted, I set my Obfuscated Health stats back to my real ones and waited for Griff, daydreaming about no longer being in pain.

Status Obfuscated Status Name Keagan Murray Sean Holman Level 6 3 Progress 174/299 82/172 Statistics Health 2/67 2/34 Health Regen (/hr) 3.0 1.6 Mana 113/113 49/49 Mana Regen (/hr) 6.2 3.0 Strength 10 10 Endurance 9 9 Dexterity 12 12 Intelligence 17 12 Perception 11 11 Charisma 10 10 Abilities Identify II Identify II Obfuscate III Observe I Observe I Skills Spear 2 2 Spells Attunements Space 16 Time 10 Earth 8 8 Fire 7 7 Resistances

A while later, Griff returned accompanied by a short, wiry woman around his age. I Observed her but, like from Griff, got only a screen full of question marks. They were carrying a couple bundles of what turned out to be meat and berries.

“Hey there lazy bones!” Griff said as they approached, “This is Marnie. She is a hunter and scout and has graciously provided us with dinner. She even said she could be convinced to take you out hunting tomorrow.”

This was enough to finally get me up and introduce myself properly. After that, we headed into Griff’s house and he set about stoking his fire to cook the threx haunch that Marnie brought. Apparently, a threx was a creature the size and shape of a deer, but with a single, venomous horn on its head. They were also omnivorous.

As Griff was preparing dinner, I asked about the local geography and Marnie was happy to describe it in great detail. The gist of it was that there were trees everywhere, a large river a couple hundred yards east of the town, a mountain range running from the west to the north of town, and that nothing had agreed-upon names. The river was where most of the townsfolk got their water and did their washing. It had one bridge crossing it by the town and was apparently slow enough to swim across, but Marnie warned against doing so in the springtime.

During dinner, I ate with a fervor that surprised me while Griff and Marnie gossiped. I did manage to persuade her to take me hunting the next day, despite any sloppy eating skills I may or may not have displayed. Once my belly was full, I started having trouble keeping my eyes open, so I said my goodbyes, stopped at an outhouse, and headed back to my new home. Despite the complete upheaval of my life, my uncomfortable bedding, and the light still in the sky, I was asleep moments after lying down.